Today at home, at 10am, I noticed two guys with a 2 yard long fairly stiff wire trying to pop the door open on a pickup truck right in front of my neighbor's house.
First I'll describe the situation; you may have a very strongly held view on what I should do and think, and be ready to punish me.
But I claim that I can "continuously" vary the parameters of the situation to either 1) put you, too, into a very difficult situation morally where you'll feel lots of conflict or 2) get you to take back the initial feeling of wanting to judge me severely for what I do/feel.
But first, the situation and description of the people and place involved
Who?
The guys: 1st wears a hoodie, hood up, fluorescent yellow. The 2nd wears a plaid top over a black sweatshirt. Both about 5' 7", heavyset, 30s-40s.
The location: near mountain view; an isolated neighborhood. Neighbors seem to all work in IT; many Teslas; near a good local elementary school which was recently renamed due to the discovery of supposedly bad views held by the man it was originally named after, who had been a 1930s local education bigwig. The details of this are unclear but it was discovered and renamed to the name of a local female minority educator within the last 5 years.
The local cultural situation
The houses are all expensive; all week, somehow, though, both sides of the street are full of huge trucks which are the yard care guys coming by and blowing leaves around, etc. As a renter, I too have these guys who don't really interact with me. I've tried a bit but it's just not really a thing; if I see them face to face I do pause and try to say something but we've not yet ever had a conversation here, or at any of the previous place where this has been the case, for over 5 years in 3 different houses. It's a sore point since I don't like the feeling of not even being able to work with them or cooperate or even speak to them.
I'm assuming that there are class/social/language/religion differences; not being able to even be civil enough to say good morning to them seems plain wrong, in general. Let alone to do neighborly things like offer them a glass of water, to work with them on how to actually do the landscaping, or better yet, negotiate on not using gas-powered leafblowers, or on how to keep the grass alive.
The situation
They're using string, wire, etc to try to pop the driver's side door; they've been at it for over 30 min.
After thinking about it I went out and got my mail (at a mailbox nearby) and as i passed I said "locked the keys in, huh?" and one said "yeah, do you have any ideas"; I kept moving and suggested a locksmith. To even go out I had thought it through and had decided to try to integrate them in; the feeling of somehow not being able to take any action was what pushed me into movement.
In the end, they got it open and are now gone; I'd hoped they hadn't completed their work yet and would stick around for a while; In that case I had been planning to go over and see their faces & say hello, and be glad with them to have solved this, and to recognize them so that we can avoid this kind of feeling next time.
Things I considered:
No other neighbors were out; I'd have liked to go over as a group w/one of the older locals and make the situation okay that way.
What I would expect them to do
They definitely should put their hoods down. They may not know, but it would have made the situation more cool. The way the one guy responded to me as I passed was okay; but even then, I only ever say the corner of his face; and his buddy kept his own face fully hidden behind the first guy who was craning his head around to see me.
They were understandably anxious about the whole situation, as was I, so no blame there. From their point of view it really is tough & they may not have had any good options at all.
The controversial intuition pump
Imagine YOU were overseas, possibly without a proper visa (unclear, but both anti-immigration and pro-immigrant groups make this assumption)
Say, you were in indonesia, or peru, russia, or switzerland, and you weren't strictly legal. And you locked your keys in. Would you, hood up, openly try to break into a car in full daylight, in a densely packed residential neighborhood with runners and dog walkers passing by constantly? I mean, what can you do, right, you have to? from their POV they had to get into that car since they have jobs to do and things like that!
From my experience in China, someone from there would probably have already had a local connection to a Chinese locksmith, tow truck guy, etc. through WeChat who they could have called to help.
As the one who lost the keys, you should have you smiling face out, brightly, greeting everyone in the local language, apologizing, and trying to get into conversations and stand together with them, specifically to break the frame of you breaking into a truck (openly trying to slip a huge wire down the outer window into the lock area of a car to pop it open). Do people in Mexico ever steal each others trucks? Initially it sounds too brazen, and I don't think in reality that this has any chance of actually being a sophisticated scam to steal the trucks of lawn workers by relying on everyone being afraid to call the police since we'd both hate them and also be trying to avoid letting ICE know anything about people they may mistreat. Realizing this was too far and not worth worrying about was what led me to go out and try to talk to the guys in the first place.
But still, it's a sign of the times (and a meaningful internal contradiction) to face the fact that when speaking of myself in indonesia, I have no problem at all criticizing myself for not learning the local language of the country I was in, and for not solving it better. But to think about criticizing an immigrant here... it feels very creepy.
A similar strangely non-transitive feeling is when I think of how easily I can accept a "new name" e.g. if I was working in China, of course nobody can pronounce the actual sounds of my name and I'd be totally happy to accept nearly any mandarin name, to make people comfortable. And I'd also clearly openly recommend everyone to do that, and even criticize them for not doing that. yet when in the USA I meet someone who is insisting I pronounce their basically non-english name in their own native accent, and refusing to shift the sounds towards English at all, it would be socially death to criticize them and recommend them to do the obvious, to give up their sacred pure home name and instead take on a name like "John".
Revel in that feeling - why do I (of course) have zero problem seeing why name changing is fine and has no effect on ME yet am not applying that basic level of expected ability to overcome superficial difficulties in people who are here? Why am I indulging in that? Why can't I say "hey, your name is super hard for me to pronounce; can I call you John?" and yet if I imagine on my first day in Chine someone had said "E— your name is SO hard for us to pronounce! would you mind if we call you Daidai?" I'd have loved someone for having enough guts to do that!
I don't know why that is but I see it a lot.
The metas of this police/ice situation are bad for everyone
This whole ICE thing is really bad for everyone, since it means possibly vulnerable people now can't rely on the police at all to help them; jerks can try to get working people deported by calling the cops on them; and maybe not yet, but over time, actual criminals are also empowered to exploit people this way too, and rely on blue fear of calling the cops to protect them. I don't believe in defunding the police or anything like it; so I think everybody should see that being a special kind of person such that it's wrong to call the police about you or to help you, is bad.
If you would condemn me, let's vary the parameters
- make it at nighttime
- make the guys be white and speaking english
- make the two guys be white, teens, aggressive, drunk, and speaking english
- make yourself weaker, smaller, more vulnerable, or imagine more vulnerable people living in that house
- imagine the owner of the truck is a woman, perhaps the estranged wife of one of the guys?
- imagine the two guys had acted more innocent (hoods down, apologizing)
- imagine the car is not a pickup truck but rather a Tesla
- one of them has a visible weapon, knife in pocket for example
- let's reverse the neighborhoods - the two guys are say two indian IT worker-looking-guys and the neighborhood is redwood city, in a district where most families speak spanish at home. what would or should happen there?
- imagine the two guys were dressed like mormons and held bibles
For you, what param changes can you make so that you now view the situation as totally fine and that it's being handled really well and properly? Then, what is the minimum change to make in the other direction to make you uncomfortable? Then, how far do you have to vary it so that you'd call the police right away?
I'm trying to see if you can admit that you followed a policy of "evaluate evidence, make estimates"
I claim that the feeling that I'm "wrong" for even considering calling the police will come from people who are using this kind of private social/reality decision procedure: they'll look at the evidence, the guys, their behavior, the location etc, then subconsciously check if this matches the "white male being racist" pattern (or if other people are likely to think so, regardless of what you think), or if you think that the guys/situation/etc. is so clearly risky that you (really, other people) are likely to accept that frame. if the racist pattern triggers, then they flip into a mode where they don't want to talk about evidence and instead will send out political attacks for me even bringing this up, either due to real belief or to worries that not doing so will be punished
in the privacy of their own minds, though, if that was you (and it was me, partially; I definitely wondered if I was being racist during the whole thing), I remind you that it's okay to privately at least think about what options we have here. And I claim that running over the variables above about them or the situation enough and you'll be able to detect the outlines of your "PC override" region; the spot where "it's okay to call the police" becomes true is one of the outer extents of that zone, and where "I'd go outside and talk to them without worrying about anything" becomes true is the other lower edge of the potential "I'm secretly ignoring evidence and defending myself politically" may have injected itself.
Another interesting zone
Are there zones where you would call me racist, but where if you were me, you would still avoid going over to greet the guys? If those existed, it would be very suspicious, if you think about it. Another one would be if you would strongly feel you don't want to discuss this situation; that you yourself don't consider wondering what to do here racist, but you don't want to explain your reasoning or even bring it up. Why wouldn't you want to bring up a potential crime you saw? That makes no sense, right? I'm asking you to admit privately that it's totally reasonable to think about crime, your neighborhood, etc. and it's very strange how we're somehow not allowed to do that now. What could explain this? The existence of a large-scale pattern of people being attacked related to racism
So my real hope
Is that everyone, even PC people, will just be able to talk about things without so much worry about being profiled badly. That we wouldn't have to worry about how our actions might look, and instead work locally.
And so I'm writing this article to try to characterize the current pattern
- look at the situation
- test for likely overrides (by imagining the minds of others and political risks)
- announce your conclusion
And that even PC people DO do evidence analysis. But they just hate to do it publicly since that would weaken their self-defense plan of flipping into attacking someone (which is often mandatory, and failure to do so itself can be a violation).
My overall conclusions
This 2nd party PC/safety statement evaluation step sucks. We should make more people uncancellable so we would be able to deal with problems directly and advise everyone involved in every situation on how to improve things, without the implication of guilt. i.e. even situations not your own fault can be improved by your better choices.
I want to be able to say things like "When in a foreign country, learn their behavior, match their expectations, and learn their language, as a basic way to show respect and fit in" which I'd apply to myself when overseas, to new people coming in to regions of the US.
At the very least, the pattern of varying supposedly immaterial aspects of situations yet being able to produce ones which have very different salience is a useful technique for letting yourself notice things which are taboo within your own society.
And how can I forget the meta
I've also been criticized often for being "too obsessed with race." Perhaps that's so, but I don't see anybody else posting about daily issues like this they run into; my explanation has been that they're afraid of being judged and that even explaining their position would expose them to risk, so they're taking the safe way out of not talking about it in putlic. But an alternative could be that people just aren't noticing this kind of thing. And that metas like automatically acting like everyone who talks about neighborhood issues on nextdoor.com is racist. Now, I'm not on that site and definitely can'd defend everything; yet sometimes the criticism of them is so strong it starts covering even the idea that I can look out my window and see what's going on and even... judge it.
It actually is essential that I more clearly make the claim that it's natural and almost expected that people would care about this kind of local issue. So I'll say clearly that I think anyone who owns or rents a house should and does have a strong interest in the behavior of people who walk by; whether they're criminals or safe; whether they have records or not; etc and that anyone who claims not to is just lying or self-delusional. And if the person owns, or has kids, moreso.